I started off very excited about Soul Eater, watching it with friends as well as in my free time. I enjoyed the pleasing art style, its inspirations in history and legend, and its themes of personal growth. The fights were well choreographed and drawn, giving points of excitement in a story I found enticing. The best part of Soul Eater for me was the protagonist duo, the main characters Maka and Soul. Compellingly voiced with nuanced and believable backgrounds, it was their relationship that drove the story as well as fueled my investment into it. Their tribulations and victories are still fondly remembered by me and the friends of mine who finished the show. If you'd asked me by about a quarter of the way through the 52 episodes I own, having bought them before finishing the series, I would have said with certainty that Soul Eater would be one of my all time favorites.
Instead, what I was delivered by the second half of the show was a haphazardly written show that used cheap and barely thematic conflict to reach meaningless milestones. The characters I enjoyed for their emotional depth lost the stage to a full cast of comparably mundane amalgams of anime tropes. It's easier to write character conflict when the only thing your character cares about is symmetry, and by the end of the show easy writing was all it had. Worse, while this trend began cheapening the conflict and plot across the board, the show still couldn't avoid plot holes, deus ex machina and Chekhov's guns. The show past episode 27 was in tedious decline but it wasn't until 42 that I plain called it quits, all thanks to the complete degradation of the plot. This lack of effort ended up shattering its entire sense of continuity and rendering all but the most basic characters utterly unrecognizable.
I'm honestly embarrassed that I recommended this show to my friends.
